This invention relates to a communication system that provides customer care and, in particular, to the provision of an integrated work management engine component of the communication system to orchestrate all forms of work relating to the servicing of customer requests.
It is a problem in customer service scenarios, such as a call center system, that these systems are architected in a manner to minimize the cost of providing the offered services pursuant to some predefined level of responsiveness to customers"" requests. The call center systems typically provide a pool of customer service representatives (termed xe2x80x9cagentsxe2x80x9d herein), who have various skill levels, to provide the customer with a substantially appropriate response to their inquiry (also termed a xe2x80x9ccontactxe2x80x9d herein). The agents are managed by a call center administrator who manually generates metrics representative of various agent performance factors, including but not limited to: speed of processing the request, competence in providing the customer with appropriate data, knowledge of the subject matter, and the like.
Call center call routing systems use these metrics to interconnect a customer with an available agent who is determined to have the skills to most efficiently process the contact. The definition of these metrics and the efficiency measure are highly subjective and typically fail to recognize many other factors that are relevant to the processing of an incoming contact.
A further problem is the presence of multiple forms of media communications in customer service scenarios, such as a call center, where many existing information access systems are architected for voice-only access and in a manner to minimize the cost of providing the offered services pursuant to some predefined level of responsiveness to customers"" requests. For example, a call center comprises an automated call management system where customers can access information regarding products and services that are offered by the call center operator. The call center is generally staffed by a number of agents who answer queries from the customers, provide information, and take customer orders. In order to increase the efficiency of operation of the call centers, these systems are architected to force a customer""s incoming call down a predefined path through an immutable response hierarchy. While this reduces the cost of providing the agents and yet provides a modicum of service to the customers, these call center systems are limited in their ability to truly serve each particular customer""s needs. In particular, the incoming call is queued as a function of the type of media, thereby requiring the implementation of multiple disjunct queues, each having different call management parameters and customer wait times. Furthermore, the call connection to a particular agent represents a localized transaction that cannot easily be forwarded to another agent during the processing of the call connection while retaining the call context. For example, the order entry agent cannot easily forward any information regarding the customer if the call is transferred to another agent and the customer must again provide the information requested by the original agent. This process is frustrating to both the agent and the customer. In addition, the call center operator may have extensive information regarding the customer, their existing orders, past orders, preferences, account balance, and the like, but this information is distributed over numerous databases within the organization and cannot easily be used to enhance the level of services provided in the processing of the customer""s next incoming call.
In summary, existing communications systems are lacking in their simplicity of use and ability to integrate the numerous (and growing in number) disjunct information systems that are in use in commerce.
The above described problems are solved and a technical advance achieved by the present integrated work management engine for customer care which orchestrates all forms of work (voice calls, E-Mail, fax, image, web forms, and the like) relating to the servicing of customer requests across the entire business enterprise. This integrated work management engine brings together all types of disparate communication system components, applications and information storage systems so the business which provides the customer care via these systems can respond to their customer requests in a unified, repeatable, efficient and effective manner. The integrated work management engine also integrates the real time operation of the front office customer communications and the batch data processing mode of the back office. This architecture facilitates the parallel processing of tasks and enables the back office components to perform data mining tasks to manage the interactive pieces of the customer relationship in a more efficient manner.
The integrated work management engine accepts work through multiple access channels, where the channel can accept a work request in the form of voice calls, E-mail, fax, image, web forms, and the like. Each work request arriving on a channel is automatically mapped to a process flow that specifies the task associated with the handling of the particular work item. The integrated work management engine uses resource selection algorithms to select the customer agent who is best equipped to handle the next step of the work request where customer data is accessed, and customer case files are updated through the fulfillment process. The selected customer agent views the customer information, process information, forms, and performance statistics on their desktop terminal device through an API set that is tightly coupled to the integrated work management engine. Thus, the system manages all of the work for the enterprise related to customer care. The system also provides management and reporting of the agent activity and performance, as well as on the full customer experience and context.